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History of the Museum
The Museum of the Opera del Duomo Orvieto was founded in 1882. On June 9th of that year 1156 visitors attended the inauguration of the collections in the premises of the administrative headquarters of the Fabbriceria. The collections were subsequently transferred to Palazzo Soliano. The Etruscan and Medieval Museum of the Opera del Duomo Orvieto was a particularly significant cultural event for its task was to preserve the testimonials of the "fine arts and memories of the homeland" and to make the best use of them for educational purposes.
In the early nineteenth century there had already been signs that this venerable institution was to play a role in the growing civic aspiration to preserve the local art heritage. This was also stimulated, following Napoleon's looting of Italy, by the norms in Pius VII's chirograph of 1802, confirmed in 1820 by the edict of the Cardinal Chamberlain Pacca.
The activities of management, safeguarding and custody of the cathedral and its relative materials were augmented with an active program of "collecting" the archaeological and historical-artistic assets present in the territory that were running the risk of being lost through neglect, urban transformation and an aggressive antique market. By the end of the 1840s the Opera had already collected a considerable number of art objects, thanks to the cultural and artistic sensibility of its board of directors who promoted important acquisitions such as the fourteenth-century reliquary of Saint Sabinus. But donations and deposits were also made by private citizens. Due to the growing interest on the part of artists and scholars, the material was transferred to a room in the Palazzo dell'Opera in Piazza Duomo, where what might be called a first Wunderkammer was installed between 1875 and 1879.
In the next two decades the collection continued to grow thanks to funds of art from the churches, convents and confraternities in Orvieto and the surroundings which had been abandoned or suppressed as a result of post-unification policies regarding religious orders, as well as municipal deposits and private donations. The monumental works of sixteenth-seventeenth century painting and sculpture which were removed from the cathedral as a result of the late nineteenth-century radical restoration policy were also turned over to the museum. Consequently various heterogeneous collections were formed, including archaeological finds, painting, sculpture, medieval and modern ceramics, sacred textiles and vestments, religious furnishings, numismatics and prints.
The identity of the museum had by then been firmly established, inspired by civic and educational ideals and by the collector's taste of the latter half of the nineteenth century. But it was not until 1897 that it became an organized museum, with the transferal of the collections to Palazzo Soliano which had been restored with this in mind and which still today bears the word "Museo" on the facade. The collections were installed in a synchronical commixture, where they remained until 1989 when the Museum was closed.
The Soprintendenza dell'Umbria had already planned to use the recently restored Papal Palaces for further exhibition space. The potentialities as a museum venue had previously been tested in the exhibition "Conservation: theory and practice" installed in 1984 in line with the most up to date museum criteria of the time. At the end of the Nineties the Opera opted for a new project which would involve the whole complex of papal buildings with an eye to creating an articulated and systematic distribution of the art collections of the Museum.
The collections of the Opera del Duomo were presented to the public in April 2006 in what premises were ready, in anticipation of the completion of the museum as a whole. Studies are under way to enrich the educational instruments and the exploitation of this important historical-artistic heritage with a campaign for documentation and research parallel to that of recovery and restoration. This activity has gradually given this venerable institution the vitality and accessibility that were the original aims not only of the administrators of the Opera and the municipal government, the scholars and technicians who directly promoted it – from Francesco Pennacchi to Carlo Franci, Giuseppe Ravizza, Luigi Fumi and Paolo Zampi – but of all those who considered it the concrete expression of the highest deals of their home town and hoped therefore to enrich the fund with their donations.
In September 2008 the museum system was further enhanced when the twentieth-century Emilio Greco Museum was included in the Museum henceforth known as MODO as the point of departure for the visit to the collections. It substantiates the connection of the Sicilian artist with the history of the cathedral and the bronze doors he sculptured in the 1960s, a sign of the vitality of the Opera del Duomo as a sponsor and promoter of art, up to the present.
The museum visit has been planned so that it intersects the urban fabric of the city, from Piazza del Duomo and the apostolic palaces to the oldest medieval part of the city, the millenary quarter of San Giovenale and the Church of Sant'Agostino.
This route launches the centrality of the monument-symbol, the cathedral, and reinterprets and completes its exploitation in various moments and places which may have an autonomy of their own – in the materials exhibited and in the buildings themselves– but which thematically interact, encouraging the visit and enriching knowledge by stimulating comparisons and references.
The MODO thus, in its various venues, restores a series of works of enormous historical-artistic value created in a period that spans five centuries, to the public enjoyment. They reflect the wide range and variety of the material collected and preserved, reaffirming the original profound ties of the Opera del Duomo with the city and the territory of this institution and its Museum, created at the end of the nineteenth century with a strong civic and municipal connotation.